Nathan VanderKlippe
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Oct 18/02) - Weledeh MLA Joe Handley said Thursday he has no intention of resigning over a communication failure that led to the dismissal of the entire board of directors for the NWT Power Corporation.

MLA Sandy Lee: "He's not mandated to be Joe Handley, one-man show."

"I haven't done anything wrong. I've given the power corporation a direction. They got it; it's clear," said Handley, minister responsible for NTPC. "There was some confusion in what the executive council minutes meant ... so they took their own interpretation of it and carried on. I don't see how there was anything wrong."

Premier Stephen Kakfwi said he never considered asking for Handley's resignation.

"We are accountable to the members of the legislature," said Kakfwi. "To have him resign or be shuffled at this time would circumvent that accountability."

However, Range Lake MLA Sandy Lee said Handley's personal support of a one-rate zone made him unfit to continue as a cabinet minister.

"He's not mandated to be Joe Handley, one-man show. He is our servant. He's a servant of the people and he's a servant of the legislature as a cabinet minister, and he has to understand that."

The NTPC board was fired Tuesday for refusing to withdraw the one-rate application. They were replaced with an interim board comprised of deputy ministers. They are expected to quickly withdraw the flat-rate application and replace it with an application based on the differing cost of providing power to communities.

Focus of debate

Handley was grilled by other MLAs for hours in the legislative assembly Thursday about the firings and about his apparent failure to properly communicate a cabinet decision to the board of directors.

Some MLAs wanted to know who knew what and when.

Kakfwi said cabinet decided Aug. 6 that the power corp. should cease consultation work on a number of projects. The Aug. 6 decision, which made no specific mention of a "one-rate zone," referred back to an Oct. 15, 2001 decision in which cabinet clearly told the power corporation to pursue the one-rate idea.

The record of the August decision was so confusing that both Kakfwi and the former power corporation board asked lawyers to decipher its meaning. Kakfwi said his lawyers told him the decision clearly said to stop the flat rate.

The board and its lawyers said it clearly did not -- or at least wasn't clear enough to say anything.

"Maybe in their mind that's what they thought they said, but they sure in hell didn't say it," said former board member Ric Bolivar. "I would like for somebody within that government to sit down with me and that letter and show me where it says specifically remove a one-rate zone from there."

Bolivar called the August letter "some gobbledy-gook something that people can read 17 ways."

Government meddling

MLAs criticized the premier for two previous cabinet decisions which overrode NTPC board initiatives, saying the government was meddling in power corporation affairs.

Kakfwi said the interventions were evidence of an unco-operative board.

"We don't seem to work very well together, and so I think the proper thing to do is not to resign and quit but rather to address that fundamental problem," he said. "The power corporation may ... think they're more independent than they actually are."

Handley said the government may have to do things differently in the future.

"Not formal changes -- I just think we'll be a lot more careful in how we word records of decision to make sure that there isn't this kind of ambiguity," he said.

Handley said he hopes to have a new board in place by November. His office has sent other MLAs a letter asking for recommendations to the board of directors.

But some questioned what kind of mandate that new board will have, and how effective it will be.

"This has left the board in rubble, essentially," said Yellowknife South MLA Brendan Bell.

"And we're now going to sift through it and try to bravely go through it with some new board members? I don't think it's going to work."